Mamdani seeking Nehru in a divided world

ZOHRAN Mamdani's election as Mayor of New York City (NYC) has evoked worldwide responses, ranging from idealistic expectations of radical reforms for "affordability" to fearmongering about his supposed "communist" and "jihadist" goals. To what extent he will be successful as the Mayor in fulfilling his mandate of economic fairness and social justice only time will tell. Central to his speech, however, was his evocation of the lives and identities of immigrants, mostly people from the Global South, in NYC and other American cities.

Furthermore, beyond the US, Mamdani's overall vision forces us to reflect historically on the immigrant experience in the West since the mid-20th century, as well as on the status of minority communities in the nations of the Global South.

In his speech, Mamdani vividly evoked the presence and labours of immigrants in NYC: "Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city: … I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties … Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burn."

Laying out their plight, Mamdani then issued a forceful riposte to President Donald Trump's harsh anti-immigrant policies and nationalistic rhetoric: "New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant."

Ideals of liberalism, underpinned by the rule of law, free speech and equal rights for all were crucial in shaping both emerging and full-fledged democracies from mid-20th century onwards, in the post-war (post-Nazi) and postcolonial world. This credo provided the necessary pushback against fascist authoritarianism.

And key to these liberal ideals were the migrant/immigrant experiences. Despite the many challenges of delivery and of persisting inequality, the ideals had — and continue to have — an important effect worldwide. These principles drew many immigrants from the Global South to the west, and, as a result, made Europe a better place, for instance, by expanding its cultural, religious, political and affective communities, implementing social change and the rule of law. Similar democratic drives emerged in varying iterations across south and east Asia, as well as the southern hemisphere.

Populism harnessed to authoritarian governments, as seen in the US lately, is part of a growing global phenomenon, exhibiting different degrees of control over their populations — and at different stages of authoritarian takeovers. These range from Russia to Hungary to North Korea, China, India, Egypt and Turkey, among others, as well as in the southern hemisphere. Furthermore, such populist impulses are also evident in extreme right-wing political parties in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries.

Looking back, these authoritarian trends uncannily mirror the evolution of authoritarianism in the 1930s, as described by Hannah Arendt in her prescient work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She explains how an alienated population under fascist rule found meaning and purpose in myths of national greatness — premised on the idea of a pure race.

Thus, not surprisingly, Nazi antisemitism and racism against "others" in society gave disaffected citizens their sense of identity.

Today, when masked and armed US Immigration &Customs Enforcement (ICE) members are literally grabbing people —mostly brown and black, and from immigrant populations — on the streets of American cities without any due process, the victims are also cast as inferior "others" with limited or non-existent citizenship. All of these policies are buttressed by a call to "Make America Great Again" — to purify the nation through a homogenous population: white, Christian and so forth.

In these historical contexts, we can appreciate Mamdani's insistence on asserting the rights and privileges of immigrants in a city looking up at the iconic Statue of Liberty. But similar myths of national greatness coupled with racial and religious purity tests have also propelled an authoritarian Hindutva nationalism in contemporary India, which is far removed from the nation's origins in 1947.

This was perhaps in Mamdani's mind when his speech took a distinctive — and to many, surprising — global turn as he invoked the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister: "A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance."

Nehru's "Tryst with Destiny" speech, from which this line was taken, signaled a forward-looking idea of India based on parliamentary democracy, pluralism, secularism and constitutional freedoms. In fact, Nehru's legacy of a liberal democracy was founded on concrete educational, scientific and cultural institutions — ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), and more locally, the NSD, National School of Drama. Cumulatively, values of these institutions were reiterated through Nehru's lifetime.

The signature product of Nehru's vision of a forward-looking modern India was the modernist city of Chandigarh, which he saw as "symbolic of the freedom of India… an expression of the nation's faith in the future." This faith in a new future had a particular poignancy as Chandigarh was built to resettle refugees and migrants from west Punjab in the aftermath of the traumatic partition of the nation. Thus, re-settling in a modernist, unfamiliar architectural habitat, displaced "immigrants" embraced a futuristic destiny of equal citizenship.

Politicians and leaders are typically judged by the economy or delivery in governance. But equally, we should also evaluate their vision for their nation and its future. Is it a vision which inspires unity and tolerance? Does it uphold equal citizenship for all? How does it counter the authoritarian aspects of political forces in the nation? Such questions remain with us today, from Nehru to Mamdani, but ones we should keep raising.